That would certainly make his unlikely career trajectory (constant lateral moves upwards once sussed out as a fraud or just plain bad employee) make even more sense than the typical “rich dad ergo fail upward” explanation.

Now do Alan Dershowitz!

Intention doesn’t always carry over well via text, but going from “shocking” and “I guess…” to “Do you not understand…?” comes across as a bit condescending/aggressive. Perhaps you thought I was being hostile? Or, perhaps I’m misreading the intent.

At any rate, keeping in mind the things that don’t carry across over text, I wasn’t disagreeing with you and was merely speculating in a parallel fashion about those that don’t return and/or are deemed unacceptable defection by the leadership in Pyongyang. I haven’t picked over my initial comment but it’s possible that I put a period somewhere a question mark was supposed to go or something. Regardless, I apologize if I came across as trying to argue against what you were saying, it was not my intention. I don’t tend to process things in a strictly linear progression and that translates to words that come out sometimes a bit disordered seeming or perhaps seemingly lacking in explicit context where it might be needed to ensure clarity in what I’m saying.

To answer the question rather than treat it as rhetorical: It’s quite possible that I don’t know how North Korean defection usually works because I’m not North Korean nor a policy analyst/SME specializing in North Korea. I read the article and your comment and found myself speculating, given the situation and deepening ties with Russia (who are objectively experts at tracking down dissidents abroad) about what policy and procedures might be in place now the event of would-be permanent defectors that end up becoming anti-Pyongyang mouthpieces or are high rank enough to leak meaningful intel to an adversary (I doubt they are sending any such people to Ukraine). But, I’m not an expert, I’m just a person speculating and commenting because I enjoy doing so and seeing what others have to say (including you). Thanks for sharing the article, have a good one.

Or maybe they have an agreement to receive intel from Russia on the whereabouts of any problematic defectors/assistance dealing with them. I imagine the threat to loved ones back home is a huge deterrent for most would be defectors, though some are obviously desperate enough to overcome that and defect anyway.

You’re operating under the delusion that they’re moderating in good faith.

Believe it or not, also Rule 1, straight to the banhaus you go. /s

I got a temporary ban in memes for saying “OpenAI/MS media alliance goes brrrrr” lmao. “Rule 1.” The OP was yet another post about Google’s crappy AI suggestions and I was implying that the mass beating of that dead horse in article after article was because the media is friendlier to OpenAI and MS in the AI space (kinda the same way Apple gets a free pass in the phone space more often than not for shitty practices and taking credit for inventing features that have existed on Android for years prior). But, even in the absence of clarification (since my quip was just observational and not meant to spark conversation lol), I have no clue how that or a lot of the other things they cite “Rule 1” on could possibly be construed as bigoted - there aren’t enough words to work with in the comment I used as an example, just a barely coherent bit of tongue-in-cheekness. Arbitrariness of enforcement is authoritarian af. I messaged a mod to ask what was up since I didn’t realize modlog was a thing at the time and didn’t hear back (which is fine really). It’s more just the finding out when you go to interact and getting a connectivity error and having to sus out what happened that’s annoying and doesn’t feel conducive to a healthy community.

Getting an automated message in your inbox telling you you’re banned, the length of the ban, and why would be a little more user friendly (though public modlogs are nice) if the goals of the developers are trying to build an inclusive platform. A lot of users aren’t necessarily the type to get a persistent itch when something curious happens, so “figure it out yourself” isn’t a great system. But, if what’s going on over at .ml really is indicative of what the goals of the developers are, it does give me pause about Lemmy as a project and where it will go in the future. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the situation is ripe for the project to be compromised if a dev is compromised and people shouldn’t be sleeping on that. Bad actors injecting seemingly inert exploits into code reviewed by others can happen with any software and fly under the radar, even popular and well trusted FOSS (for reference, see “that time the CIA snuck a backdoor into Notepad++”), so it’s alarming if a group of developers appear to be sympathizers for nationstates that are notoriously privacy hostile.

They will ban you for comments that are so inert it’s impossible to even know what offended them, it’s ridiculous.

I’m aware of how it turned out, but, for the sake of clarity, I was speaking about a month prior to that outcome where the President of South Africa made it clear that he would now allow Putin to be arrested in the event that Putin chose to attend in person. Assuming his statements were straight forward, I even get the logical underpinnings of what he was saying here - it just seems an odd contrast for the SA government to turn around and champion the ICC months later. It’s hard to take a country that recently publicly pragmatized away the need to uphold the legitimacy of ICC authority seriously when they’re now using the ICC as a threat. Another country would be better to lead the charge here on behalf of the ICC.

Setting aside (but stating) my stance that Israel’s policy of collective punishment against innocent Palestinian civilians is completely wrong and thus unconditional support from the US government for Israeli actions is also wrong - South Africa isn’t a good faith actor here.

What was South Africa’s official position last summer, as a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC and thus a nation obligated to arrest those with an ICC arrest warrant that step foot in their territory, about honoring their obligation to execute an arrest on the ICC warrant issued for Putin for war crimes should he step foot in their territory? It almost seems like they’re trying to distract from something or are maybe working towards mutual goals with some other entity (or entities) behind the scenes… Hmm.

*Random mods on some instances, however…

Some mobile clients open the thumbnail version of images. If you instruct your client to open the image in a browser, you’ll see that the url has thumbnail instructions appended to the end and those can be trimmed off of the end to show the full image.

John Kirby then further elaborated, saying “We have not seen the Israelis employing dodecahedron formations consisting of smaller Koch snowflake arrangements - if we see this kind of serious business, we’ll need to assess our red line. We remain vigilant but have seen no evidence of them using this kind of major strategy.”

Thanks for the levity/chuckle.

I’m not convinced that Democrats wouldn’t just happily go down down with the ship, so to speak, if they believed stopping the genocide was the singular issue that people’s votes hinged upon. I don’t know where that really leaves us all either, given how horrible the alternative is. If the Citizens United decision hadn’t of happened we might have politicians that didn’t act beholden to far-right Israelis, but, even considering the unfettered money poured into politics, it’s ridiculous the hold that they seem to wield over both main parties in the US.

Biden’s red line just so happens to be an infinitely elastic rubberband.

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